Prof. Jisha Menon (Stanford), Necrosonics: Rap, Race, and Policing

This paper argues that rap music constitutes a site of what I call, “necrosonics,” an artistic channel that Black rap artists use to grapple with the death-dealing violence of the carceral state. In singing about police brutality, rap artists have come under increasing scrutiny from law enforcement with a range of legal consequences. While cultural critics like Tricia Rose have charted the complex racial, class, and gendered terrain inhabited by rap artists, and legal scholars like Paul Butler have turned to hip hop as a resource to reimagine justice, this paper explores the role that rap music plays in reimagining the bounds of legal personhood. By examining the intersection of policing, rap music, and race, this paper examines the “necrosonics,” that chronicles Black precarity in the shadow of law enforcement. Necrosonics is music that navigates the death-dealing Leviathan state. It is the sound of objection – the uncanny reminder that “objects can and do speak.” Rap music provides a particularly fecund sonic archive that provides a window into police brutality against young Black men.

Chair: Laurie Bashford, LHub & Columbia University

Speaker: Jisha Menon is the Fisher Family Director of Stanford Global Studies. She is Professor of Theater and Performance Studies, and (by courtesy) of Comparative Literature. Her current research project, Confessional Performance: The Cultural and Legal Arts of Personhood, explores how legal practices entrench a particular liberal topology of personhood, and how this conception departs from other societies where persons are conceived in more plural and discontinuous ways. Her four books explore arts and aesthetics in relation to neoliberal capitalism, postcolonial nationalism, secularism, and geopolitical conflict. Her latest book, Brutal Beauty: Aesthetics and Aspiration in Urban India (Northwestern UP, 2021) considers the city and the self as aesthetic projects that are renovated in the wake of neoliberal economic reforms in India. The study explores how discourses of beauty are mobilized toward anti-democratic ends. Her first book, The Performance of Nationalism: India, Pakistan and the Memory of Partition (Cambridge UP, 2013), recuperates the idea of "mimesis" to think about political history and the crisis of its aesthetic representation, while examining the mimetic relationality that undergirds the encounter between India and Pakistan. She is also co-editor of two volumes: Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict (with Patrick Anderson) (Palgrave-Macmillan Press, 2009) and Performing the Secular: Religion, Representation, and Politics (with Milija Gluhovic) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.) Previously, she served as Assistant Professor of English at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

Discussant: TBC

The paper will be pre-circulated to registered participants.